Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Spotify
Podcast
$176.2-251.7k
+ Equity
More information about location
Commercial music streaming service
Be an early applicant
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$176.2-251.7k
+ Equity
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it
Role
Who you are
- You have 5+ years of professional experience in machine learning, with expertise in building and productionize ML systems at scale
- You’re fluent in Python; experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow is a strong plus
- You’ve worked with large-scale data systems and owning end-to-end ML workflows (data ingestion to serving)
- You have hands-on experience with cloud platforms like GCP or AWS, and with ML infra tools such as Ray, Apache Beam, or Airflow
- You have experience, or strong interest, in agent-based systems and LLM integrations
- You thrive in agile environments, care deeply about product impact, and bring a user-centered outlook to ML development
- Bonus: Experience with content recommendation, interactive media formats, or real-time systems
- Bonus: You’ve led initiatives within an organization, expertly balancing trade-offs in large-scale systems, engaging with collaborators, and crafting clear, actionable roadmaps
What the job involves
- As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, from integrating foundational models to crafting feedback loops for real-time interactivity, you'll shape how creators and consumers connect in more dynamic and intelligent ways
- This is a product-oriented role where you’ll spend time understanding roadmaps and advising leadership on the trade-offs of implementing ML solutions
- You’ll also play a key role in build-vs-buy decisions, assessing the engineering effort required, and connecting with ML teams across Spotify to find opportunities for collaboration with the Podcast mission
- Lead the ML strategy for a 200+ person organization by defining and maintaining a clear roadmap for the Spotify for Creators and Megaphone apps, collaborating closely with engineers and PMs to align on product requirements and enhance impact
- Advise leadership on ML initiatives, guiding prioritization and shaping decisions on the development and rollout of ML features
- Serve as the liaison ML efforts within the Podcast mission and ML engineers/PMs across Spotify, ensuring deep understanding of existing systems and facilitating their seamless integration into the Spotify for Creators product
- Mentor engineers in ML practices to level up Podcast Mission’s capabilities in the space
- Work closely with backend, data, and client engineers as well as PMs and designers to ship features that directly impact podcast engagement metrics
- Prototype novel agentic workflows (e.g., multi-component pipelines or tool-using agents) and contribute to experimentation around Creator-Consumer interactivity
- Own and evolve ML model lifecycle: data annotation, data pipeline construction, feature engineering, model training, deployment, and monitoring
- Design, develop, fine-tune, and deploy machine learning systems that power podcast growth
- Optimize models for scale and reliability using modern ML infra tools like Ray, Apache Beam, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Lead with an experimentation attitude. Implement A/B tests and contribute to continuous model evaluation and improvement loops to productionize solutions at scale for our millions of active podcast users
- Participate in Spotify’s ML community: share findings, explore new tools and paradigms, and contribute to scaling ML standards across the company
Our take
Spotify was founded in an attempt to combat the rampant music piracy that was causing significant harm to the industry. The company has since taken music streaming mainstream and now has 180m+ paying subscribers across the world.
With features that include a highly accessible interface and a vast catalogue of artists, Spotify's strong brand has been able to maintain growth in spite of fierce competition from deep-pocketed rivals like Amazon and Apple. The company has achieved this by making smart acquisitions to move into other verticals to strengthen its offerings, especially podcasting, by acquiring Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast.
Spotify's future plans include rapid growth with a goal to become a one-stop destination for all digital sound, as well as AI and NFT integrations. However, high costs incurred from the acquisition of exclusive podcasts, increasing competitor strength, and weak bottom-line growth mean that the company must find a balance to maintain its position in the sector.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
23% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Jan 2016
$1bn
CONVERTIBLE
Jun 2015
$526m
SERIES G
Total funding: $2.1bn
Company benefits
- Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse
- Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success
- Global parental leave, six months off - fully paid - for all new parents
- All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub
- Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs
Company HQ
Norrmalm, Stockholm, Stockholms län
Leadership
Daniel Ek
(CEO & Chairman)Founded Spotify in 2006. Previously worked as an executive at Tradera, an auction company that was sold to eBay and was briefly the CEO of uTorrent.
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